Dec. 7 is, of course, the actual 60th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the devastating surprise attack that pulled "the sleeping giant" of the United States into World War II. That the $135-million epic "Pearl Harbor" was released Friday, as opposed to the anniversary of the event, is proof of exactly how much is on the line for a movie that can't be sold with the traditional summer movie hoopla.

There's intense pressure on Disney. Yet the movie is hampered in major ways. U.S. military films don't usually do well overseas, an important part of the profit potential. And there's little opportunity to market to the boys-who-love-big-guns crowd -- and risk the appearance of exploiting personal tragedy.

Respect for those who died

"You can't sell it with `Pearl Harbor' action toys and McDonald's Happy Meals like you do most mega-budget movies," Pandya says. "You can't be in the position of seeming to exploit or disrespect those whose lives were lost and sacrificed."

Though Disney is using standard publicity items like T-shirts, ball caps and dog tags to promote "Pearl Harbor" -- as well as hosting what Pandya calls a glitzy premiere aboard a carrier ship in Hawaii -- there is a conspicuous lack of the merchandising associated with movies whose budgets hover above the gut-crunching $100 million mark.

"This was not just another big movie being made," says Disney executive Dick Cook, who believes the film deserves more respect than that.

Still, former Detroit ad executive Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced "Pearl Harbor," is quick to point out the film is not intended as a historical record.

"It's an action-movie romance set against this remarkable historical backdrop," he said in Detroit last fall. "It's spectacle, but its subject requires a more serious approach than something like `Armageddon,' which everyone recognizes is fantasy."

Romance vs. history

Though only a few test audiences (and in an arrangement that resulted in a cover story, a team from Newsweek magazine) had seen the film before reviewers saw it earlier this week, "Pearl Harbor" is more action and romance than history, though it does stay generally close to the facts. The emphasis is on the relationship between two pilots and best friends, played by Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck, both in love with a Navy nurse played by Kate Beckinsale. The bulk of the 3-hour film is given to the days leading to the attack and the attack itself; the rest is devoted to Gen. James Doolittle's retaliatory attack on Tokyo in 1942.

Mel Small, a professor of American history at Wayne State University who specializes in American foreign policy and diplomacy, says Hollywood is almost always more successful using history as a backdrop for fiction, instead of attempting to package and interpret events.

"I think `From Here to Eternity,' is an excellent movie," Small says, "in that it captures the drama of Pearl Harbor without distorting the actual details for dramatic purposes. What drives historians crazy is when a filmmaker like Oliver Stone says he's true to the factual record, then shows Nixon pouring brown booze out of a bottle, when everyone knows he drank martinis.

"When you title your movie `Pearl Harbor,' you infer you're going for the larger picture, so you bear more responsibility than `From Here to Eternity,' or even a sweeping survey like `The Winds of War.' You can't simply disregard the historical record and expect to get away with it."

Beware of exploitation

Nor, says Small, can you disregard the feelings of survivors and the families of those killed or wounded in the attack who would obviously not want to see the events exploited for the sake of a spectacular special effect.

At the same time, Small says he sees little wrong in commemorating history by commercializing it.

"I've been to Pearl Harbor, and they have a souvenir shop there. It's not quite as tacky as the Alamo, but it's there. People want to feel as they've connected somehow with history, that they've experienced it."

Disney, says a marketing executive at a competing studio, is "in an awkward marketing position, because Pearl Harbor is something like holy ground.

"Here you have one of those typical Jerry Bruckheimer movies with big explosions and aerial battles and massacres, and you can't exploit that because you would be exploiting the memory of real people who suffered and died," the executive says. "So you try to sell it like `Titanic,' and you risk losing all the boys who love all those big guns.